Michael Bloomberg gun control group site registered to N.Y.C.

The name “Mayors Against Illegal Guns” is well known as Mike Bloomberg’s gun-control arm, which he spends his personal fortune through on ads. Yet the group’s website is registered to, and handled by, official city government servers and staffers.

Domain names for MAIG were registered in 2006 by the New York City Department of Information and Technology, and have remained on official city web servers ever since.

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Yet the group’s “action fund,” through which he has piped at least $14 million of his own money in ads over gun control this year alone, is registered as a 501c4, a nonprofit “social welfare” group with the same tax status as, say, the Karl Rove-linked Crossroads GPS or Organizing for Action, President Obama’s grassroots arm. And it raises questions about why a website associated with the group is being managed by City Hall.

In fact, the various pieces of the mayor’s efforts appear as a confusing muddle online, with sites that are ostensibly not part of the 501c4 nonetheless being visually dominated by entreaties to click through to the ones that are. There’s little indication that these are different entities with different oversight.

At minimum, the use of a city web server and city employees underscore what critics have long derided as a blurring of the lines between government resources and Bloomberg’s own multi-billion-dollar fortune, his company, and his pet interests in his three terms as mayor.

Bloomberg aides strenuously pushed back on questions of propriety, insisting that there is a distinction between MAIG – which is the “broad coalition of 950 mayors” — and the MAIG “action fund,” which is the 501c4. The mayoral coalition, they argued, fits within the legislative priorities of Bloomberg’s administration.

“Mayor Bloomberg is the co-chair of the coalition of Mayors Against Illegal Guns,” said John McCarthy, a City Hall-based spokesman for Bloomberg who also handles elements of the group’s media output.

“Its activities are in the interest of keeping New York City safe. He is acting in his capacity as mayor of New York City,” he added. “Just as when he advocates for a bill in Albany that we want passed he is acting in his capacity as mayor, because he believes the bill is in the city’s interests. That is the prerogative of any mayor.”

Different mayors involved in the coalition often send out their own press releases on specific issues, Bloomberg aides said, although the MAIG website run by the city is the only such site for the coalition.

Questions about the website server were first raised by Ace of Spades blogger John Ekdahl.